Mossy stump

Pete and I were working all day down in Hertfordshire, updating a survey done a couple of years ago. It was ridiculously mild for January - I was wearing a light cotton shirt and a fleece, and I was still too hot! We ended up walking about 12km, much of it through slippery and occasionally perilously deep mud, so I'm feeling well-exercised tonight.

On our journey we came across a row of rotting fence posts, each one a miniature landscape of mosses and lichens. Amazingly, the sun appeared for a few minutes while we were examining them, giving the opportunity for a couple of shots in natural light. The main picture shows a verdant clump of Rusty Swan-neck Moss Campylopus flexuosus ( I think the rusty refers to the reddish rhizoids that clothe the stem, which can only be seen under a hand lens) and the extra shows the sporophytes of Common Pincushion Dicranoweisia cirrata.